


joyful girl

by longtime_lurker



Category: Ashlee Simpson (Musician), Bandom, Fall Out Boy, Fueled by Ramen, Pop Music RPF
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-23
Updated: 2013-11-23
Packaged: 2018-01-01 17:37:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1046643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longtime_lurker/pseuds/longtime_lurker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(everything i do is judged<br/>and they mostly get it wrong, but oh well<br/>'cause the bathroom mirror has not budged<br/>and the woman who lives there can tell<br/>the truth from the stuff that they say<br/>and she looks me in the eye<br/>and says, <i>would you prefer the easy way?</i><br/><i>no? well okay then, don't cry.</i>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	joyful girl

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted to LiveJournal in November 2008, six months after the Simpson-Wentz wedding and just a few days before Bronx was born. while this story does incorporate a lot of true biographical information - all of the quotes are real, and anything that seems like an oddly specific detail is probably actually a publicly-available fact that I dug up - the narrative woven around them is still entirely speculative and no offense is intended to the real-life counterparts of anyone depicted therein.
> 
> warning for disordered eating, period sex, and daddy issues. title and summary from Ani DiFranco.

When she was 11, Ashlee Simpson hated her sister. While she never admits this in so many words, her actions back then spoke volumes. She resented Jessica’s elder status, the way her parents fawned over their firstborn’s dreams of pop stardom...felt inferior, awkward, left out. 

A popular girl at school in Waco, Texas, Jessica would regularly have friends over, banishing Ashlee to her bedroom upstairs. But Ashlee was a combative force even as a preteen, and she liked nothing better than embarrassing her sister...so, wearing only a bathrobe, she would stomp down to Jessica’s gathering, disrobe before everyone and play the guitar naked, all the while grinning like a lunatic. 

“And you know what the funny thing was?” Ashlee says now, eyes wide. “The more Jessica begged me to stop, the more I tried to annoy her!” 

_You must really have loathed her._

“No, no, not at all. I was just, you know, having fun...” 

**- _Blender,_ September 2004**

 

From day one it's clear to her that Jessica is the golden child.

Pretty and demure, Jessica sings in Daddy's church and wants to be a star someday. She might not be the brainiest thing that God in His wisdom ever placed upon the earth (thinks Ashlee in her nastier moments) but that doesn't really matter when you're destined to grow up blonde and tanned, busty and leggy, the picture of Miss Texan allure: when you're Jess, in other words.

When you're Ashlee, you're just the ugly duckling with the big nose and mismatched outfits and peculiar sense of humor, clamoring vainly for attention, burning with the resentment of the forever-ignored.

But at age three Ashlee starts ballet lessons, and dancing becomes her life.

-

The LA mantra she'll encounter one day - _never too thin_ \- will seem like old news after the world of ballet, where eating disorders run rampant. At age eleven Ashlee is five feet and seventy-five pounds, starving away breasts and hips she doesn't have yet, until finally her parents take their eyes off Jessica long enough to march her to Outback Steakhouse, force her to eat.

She's the youngest student ever admitted to the School of American Ballet.

New York is long hours of barre work, leotards and legwarmers and closets full of pretty, whispery fabrics with pretty, whispery names: chiffon, crinoline, tulle, organdy; taping up toes and ankles, thick calluses coating the soles of her feet, slinging her satin duffel everywhere in the city cold. It's also the place where Ashlee discovers the classic rock stations, buys her first CD ( _Jagged Little Pill,_ a world away from the easy-listening Christian contemporary that her parents prefer) and comes to idolize the sexy, confident chick rockers of bygone years: Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks, Pat Benatar, Janis Joplin.

She forms a short-lived and very bad "punk" band with some dormmates, and when her parents come to pick her up at school she wears nose piercings (fake) and orange hair dye (temporary) to freak them out. Tame little rebellions, maybe, but in this family Ashlee's already learned to take what she can get.

(Later she'll write a dozen songs trying desperately to reassert that defiance, to recapture those days when she felt so precariously different, so attention-gettingly alive. It won't really work, not once they've passed through the hands of a dozen co-writers and producers and label people and Daddy.)

She doesn't touch the stacks of women's magazines that Jessica sends - the covers depress her, she knows she'll never look like that - but she does page eagerly through her friends' music mags, rips out pictures of Billie Joe from Green Day and papers her walls with them, cooing over his tight jeans and eyeliner.

(Later she'll laugh over this: roll over in the sheets and say to her bedmate, _maybe it was always inevitable._ )

Back in Texas, Mom confiscates the Alanis album (it contains "the f-word") and bans Ashlee from an Alanis show. Ashlee calls her mother a bitch and gets her mouth washed out with soap. Literally. Dad _does_ okay Lilith Fair a year later, for some reason. It's Ashlee's first real concert experience and she's totally entranced. She claps wildly for Joan Osborne, watches Jewel with big eyes and bated breath.

_Who will save your soul?_

 

We had to hold her back from the places she wanted to go to. If you change too fast, you leave behind the people that love you. 

**\- Joe Simpson in _Blender,_ December 2005**

 

Why in the world would I ever want to do anything that would hurt my children? 

**\- Joe Simpson in _US Weekly,_ June 2008**

 

While Jessica's trying to break into the Christian pop industry -

("It's not gonna happen, you know, not with them. They're like the ladies at church who always said that you were showing too much boob," her little sister, just-pubescent and preternaturally-wise, tells her one night.)

\- Ashlee dedicates her summers and winters to prestigious dance programs, grows increasingly accomplished in her craft. Endless rounds of auditions and rehearsals, the _Nutcracker_ corps at Christmastime, the Balanchine method, finally being judged ready to learn to dance _en pointe._ Wishing each other _merde!_ before performances, the dancer's equivalent of "break a leg." Pliés and pirouettes and watching herself in the wall mirrors - straight reedlike silhouette, legs turned out, hair pulled back tight from big big eyes as she floats on the tips of her toes - and she comes home tired every night to the rest of the family bitching about hostile label execs or whatever, but it doesn't matter, she's got something that's hers.

One day when she's fourteen she gets home from the studio, so giddy that she can't even feel the exhaustion, and tells her mother the big news that's just come down through her ballet mistress: Ashlee's received an official invitation to study with the Kirov Ballet.

It's an intensely coveted position for any young dancer, an incredible honor and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the culmination of all she's worked for and the stepping stone to a bright future, and she can feel her face all aglow as she babbles, "It's a dream come true, oh my gosh, Mom," and that night's the night Daddy announces, "I've decided: we're moving. We can really get Jess's career going in LA."

Britney and Christina are getting very big very fast, and Joe Simpson sees a bandwagon to jump on.

"You can go on the road with Jess and dance there!" he tells his younger daughter, who tries every trick she knows, screams and cries and pleads and refuses to eat and disappears into her room for days, throws everything he's ever said back in his face -

"I thought you said that we have to use the gifts God gave us - that you wanted to give us all the things you never had growing up - that everyone should have the chance to go for their dreams"

\- and it's all about as effective as running head-on into a brick wall. The verdict remains: Ashlee's not going to Russia.

In the end, she does hang up her toe shoes to dance back-up for her sister, and it feels like the story of her life.

 

Later, barefoot and wearing a black dress, [Ashlee] takes the stage to sing her new song, "Shadow." Mr. Simpson passes on a front-row seat, instead finding a spot above and behind the audience seats, with a clear view of the set below. For most of the performance, he looks straight ahead at a video monitor, watching to see how she will play on television. He knows the opening lyrics - "I was six years old/ when my parents went away/ I was stuck inside a broken life/ I couldn't wish away" - are about him, but on his face there's no sign of recognition or regret. 

As Ashlee finishes the song, Mr. Simpson is exultant. "She killed the choruses!" 

**\- the _New York Times,_ October 2004**

 

hey, how long till the music drowns you out? 

**\- Ashlee Simpson, "Boyfriend"**

 

Her fellow backup dancers despise her, but Ashlee doesn't really blame them. She's the little sister, after all, the spoiled baby who can never be fired no matter how clear she makes it that her heart's not in this. She'd probably despise her too.

She does a little bit of acting, and she's just started to figure out how to take refuge in being _other_ people when Daddy, with his older daughter safely launched and married off, turns his attention to the younger one. It starts when he hands down another of his announcements:

"I've decided" that a reality show for Ashlee too - every week in the slot subsequent to _Newlyweds_ , he says - would be the best way to "launch you as your own person, baby."

Something about that strikes Ashlee as kind of contradictory, but. Whatever. She knows it's too late for her to return to the professional track of ballet - she's too old, out of practice. She has to do _something_ , and the only thing she really knows how to do is perform. And she does love the energy of the stage: running and bouncing around, sweating it out, hollering and shaking her hips and getting to dance again, kind of.

-

Ashlee’s always embraced the surface trappings of the counterculture - Cons and black nail polish, ripped clothes and smoky eyes - because they were everything her sister wasn’t. When she’s starting out in the industry her father, the businessman, jumps on that: markets her as the quirky one, the flipside of femininity from Jessica's good girl.

Jessica sings bubblegum ballads, so Ashlee sings mildly angsty lyrics set to punk-lite pop. Jessica is middle America, so Ashlee's aimed toward the coasts. Jessica is the girl next door, so Ashlee's got a carefully calculated raw edge. Jessica is bleached blonde, so Ashlee goes for dyed black.

She will understand, someday, that you can't define yourself solely in opposition to something else. Not forever.

 

"Trust me, I’ve grown up into a very well-adjusted adult.” [Ashlee] takes a breath. “The only thing that really bothers me these days is the voice inside my head that fucks with me.” 

Voice? What voice? 

“You know, the voice, the one that tells you you’re going to fail, that you’re ugly and hopeless and pathetic.” She looks up at Blender, then at Mom, suddenly anxious. “We all have that voice, right?” 

**- _Blender,_ September 2004**

 

I guarantee you, 25 years from now, I'll be known as the girl that lip-synced on SNL. 

**\- Ashlee Simpson on Larry King Live, October 2005**

 

When it happens, it's like every dancer's worst nightmare: missing that vital step onstage and falling, destroying the illusion of effortlessness, weightlessness; crashing down to earth.

She walks offstage in a daze, looks at the sea of faces and says, "Hold on one second. I'm going to cry," before disappearing into the bathroom. When she shows her face again it's nearing the show's end and there's Daddy saying, "Okay, baby, pull yourself together, you have to go back out there," and she does. Ditzes her way through an apology of sorts, and afterwards lets herself be hustled into the waiting car by black men in white t-shirts while white guys in black suits jabber into their cell phones about the "incident."

That's the day she stops reading her own press.

Jessica was right on time for the turn-of-the-millennium pop bandwagon; Ashlee is right on time for the subsequent backlash. The "incident” (and she just wants to scream _call it what it is, you fuckers: call it fucking things up beyond all repair_ ) doesn't fade from public memory; it takes on a hideous life of its own, dogs her, _becomes_ her, and deep down Ashlee recognizes the death knell to her professional reputation, to any kind of serious career she ever wanted to have.

She goes on record blaming absolutely everyone but herself.

She doesn’t lip-sync the Orange Bowl, but maybe she should have, because her voice is shit and afterwards the boos are deafening. She knows they’re deserved, which is the worst part of all, and when she finally, _finally_ gets home she shuts herself in her beautifully appointed bedroom, draws all the curtains and sobs herself dry.

After that she does all her major performances with a dimly-lit backup vocalist onstage, a pretty girl singing in unison with Ashlee to strengthen the sound of her voice.

-

At twenty she moves into a house of her own (okay, so it's barely ten miles from her parents' place, and she’s technically leasing it from Daddy, but it's _something_ ) with her two best girlfriends: Ashlee's never been the social-butterfly type like Jessica, but she’s known Lauren and Stephanie since forever, trusts them like no one else. They all go for matching star tattoos to celebrate; it’s Ashlee’s first, and her parents absolutely hate it. Small rebellions.

In her room, in the dead of night, she feels it, hears it: cool wind on her face and a little girl breathing.

"I think this place is haunted," she tells her housemates, her mom, and mostly they joke about it together - Ashlee even gives the ghost a name. But later, when she buys her next (bigger, fancier, lonelier) house, she will pay an exorbitant amount to a professional exorcist to cleanse it preemptively of wandering spirits, just in case.

 

she only orders drinks without mixers.  
two bites of 100 dollar plates at dinner,  
desserts are always enough pills to get you full.  
but when im sleeping next to her im not scared what will happen to me after i die. 

**\- Pete Wentz on his blogspot, October 2006**

 

in the morning I got in a fight with myself - I got the bruises to prove it 

**\- Ashlee Simpson, "Little Miss Obsessive"**

 

She turns twenty-one and drinks too much, which means she eats too much. On a binge run to McDonalds she gets caught on tape making a plastered asshole of herself. Jessica's the one who's known for her curves, so Ashlee tells herself _that whole voluptuous thing is so not me_ and loses weight with Virginia Slims that scratch her already weak alto, with the odd line of blow from one LA friend or another.

She collapses after a performance in Japan. Her rep gives the cause as "exhaustion."

Nick and Jessica separate, then begin divorce proceedings. Daddy tells everyone - from reporters to his own family - that everything is fine with them, just perfectly fucking peachy, right up to the minute the papers go through. Ashlee only knows otherwise because Jessica keeps calling her in floods of tears, detailing the spectacular breakdown of her picture-perfect, made-for-TV marriage.

She goes out with a few guys herself, sure, but Ashlee's never been a girl who focused much on the romance thing anyway. Aspiring to be a wife and mother had always been Jess's thing, and after _that_ whole fiasco, well - Ashlee really isn't planning on settling down any time soon. She's enjoying just going out weekends with the girls and dancing the night away at whatever hotspots her name can get her into. She doesn't trust guys to want her for reasons other than said name. And anyway, her schedule is totally insane.

Then one random, ordinary day she's out in the California sun, working on her tan while she juggles iced tea and a laptop and a phone call from her publicist, and in her personal email there's this message from an unfamiliar address - just a mundane line or two, saying _hey_ and _you seem cool_ and _we should hang out sometime_.

Ashlee doesn't recognize the name, personally or professionally.

 _God only knows how he tracked this email down,_ she thinks tiredly, _creep,_ and replies with a message, saccharine and chilly, that makes it very clear that she has no idea who he is.

And that's how Pete Wentz happens. (Ashlee holds that Pete Wentz is not someone you _meet_ exactly. He's something that hits you where you're standing, like a hurricane or a falling piano. Much later, Patrick Stump will express this same idea almost verbatim to her, and Ashlee will laugh so hard that she falls off the tourbus couch.)

 

That's the thing. I don't want to date a celebrity. I want to date a normal person.... 

**\- Ashlee Simpson on Larry King Live, October 2005**

 

My biggest dream is to move to Nebraska and marry somebody super regular. 

**\- Pete Wentz in _Blender,_ June 2006**

 

To this day she seriously isn't sure exactly how it happened - probably it did have something to do with Pete sending her eight million camwhore shots of his pretty eyes - but somehow they start messaging back and forth, and pretty soon the random rambling lowercase free-verse thoughts that show up in her inbox at all hours of the night (Pete doesn't seem to sleep much) have become one of the high points of Ashlee's average week.

Although she doesn't really know how to talk to people like him. Pete's not pretentious, exactly, but he's clearly well-read and he knows and cares about, like, gay rights and the diamond business and the electoral college and Africa. He drops literary allusions alongside pop culture references, dissects his feelings like it's a four a.m. compulsion, alternates crazily between bright and dark.

"He makes me want to be so much more," Ashlee tells Jessica, and means: _Next to him, I feel too much like_ you.

It doesn’t take much Googling for Ashlee to figure out that Pete has a big mouth and worse moodswings than all her housemates on PMS at once, that he's really kind of a mess. Recently he "broke edge" (his friends have to explain that one to her, later) and in an effort to extricate himself from this incredibly complicated longterm relationship with a much younger girl, he's been drunkfucking his way through the C-list, supposedly. Ashlee hears stuff about Lindsay Lohan, Michelle Trachtenberg, that daughter of Bruce Willis's with the weird name - but there's only so much hearsay that you can trust in this town, of course.

-

The first time they actually meet in person is at Top of the Pops, when Ashlee performs the week after Fall Out Boy does. She's backstage, getting false eyelashes glued on and chattering to her personal assistant about a photoshoot, when somebody says her name.

It's not a good time - she's kind of harried at the moment - but she looks up with a smile that turns big and real when she recognizes him from the pictures. He's a lot shorter than she expected. She shrugs off the makeup guy and stands, making to hug Pete before she thinks better of it and shakes his hand instead.

"God, it's really great to finally, like, get to know you physically," she says, then feels herself blush brightly a second later. "Um -”

Pete just cracks up.

“I don’t know how my girlfriend would feel about that,” he answers, and she says hastily, “Yeah, no, I’m dating somebody right now too, I didn’t mean -”

“I know,” Pete says, still laughing, “don’t worry your head about it, nice to meet you in person as well, want to get some shitty free coffee from catering?” and then she’s laughing too, finally.

“So, hi. I’m Ash, uh, obviously, and I’m kind of a goof,” she says, and tries to cover her face with her little hands, except he’s still holding one of them.

-

They're both with other people, so nothing happens - Ashlee's proud of that - but they keep talking, on and off. Actually she's pretty sure that he's kind of following her around. The 21st century way, through hopeful-sounding texts and calls and emails. He's like a puppy, a puppy as stupid and endearing and big-brown-eyed and pocketsized as the one Pete keeps sending her pictures of (as far as Ash tell can, that dog pretty much owns Pete's soul).

It's nothing _too_ creepy, more like he just really really wants to be friends, but it still gives Ashlee a pleasantly power-trippy feeling.

"That little guy from Fall Out Boy's still stalking me," she tells Jessica in her home gym, laughing as she says it so that Jess won't go running to Daddy for a restraining order or something. Jessica's been playing dumb for so long that by now it's kind of stuck.

A little more investigation reveals that he's five years her elder (he'll be twenty-seven when they start dating, but Ashlee won't realize the significance of that until much later) and he lives at home with his parents, which is nearly a dealbreaker right there, except that Ashlee puts two and two together when she sees that he tried to OD on sleeping pills barely a year ago.

"Oh my," she says, raising her hand to her mouth as she stares at the laptop screen and thinks, _what a thing to find out from the fucking Internet._ This, this is the shitty part of fame. She'd a thousand times rather have heard that from his own mouth.

The next thing to come up is the brand-new set of leaked nudes that Pete mentioned ruefully in his last message: brown eyes and hoodie and hard-on in his hand.

"Oh _my,"_ Ashlee says through her fingers in a totally different tone.

 

“I’ve always been kind of flamboyant.” And, it transpires, rather fond of nudity. [When] her father, a minister, took her to his church for the first time...the young Ashlee arrived barefoot and strode up the aisle to the pulpit, then pulled her dress up over her head before performing a slow 360-degree pirouette. “I was like, ‘Here I am, naked and a complete mess!'" 

**- _Blender,_ September 2004**

 

_Pete:_ The first time we really hung out she flashed me...

_Ashlee:_ ...so it was love at first sight. 

**\- STAR 98.7 FM, May 2008**

 

He keeps looking around the large gleaming lobby of her hotel - she suspects that it's probably a good bit nicer than anything he can regularly afford, as yet - and up in her suite she lets him pick the music.

Pete flips through her playlists, commenting on some of it - the Beatles, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Arctic Monkeys - like he's surprised at her taste considering who she is, or something. "Hey, the Killers! They hate my band," he tells her, and "Oh, man, all this Etta James and Al Green reminds me of Patrick," and that's a name that's come up plenty in their correspondence, but she's never before gotten to hear Pete say it like this, heavy with affection.

He settles on Radiohead, plugs the iPod into its high-end speaker system and slumps back on the cushy hotel bed, staring up at the melting-clock landscape of the Dali reproduction on the wall. Ashlee follows his line of sight and says brightly, "My favorite artist in the whole world. I always ask for this place just because of that."

"Like insomnia on a canvas," Pete says, wry approval in his smile, and he shifts a little closer to her. "So, hey! You've probably seen me naked on the internet."

For a minute she thinks that's his idea of a come-on, and then remembers that he's asked the same thing of a dozen Fall Out Boy crowds. Good thing she did some YouTube stalking of her own.

"Uh-huh," she says. This is her nervous giggle. “Yeah,” and there's an awkward beat of giggle-free silence before she grins and goes with her whim: yanks her dress right up over her head and gives Pete an eyeful of lace panties and what she _knows_ are really excellent breasts, especially in her plunging push-up bra.

His gaze automatically follows the line of her cleavage, and she can feel her nipples harden in the cups. Pete's not the only one with a thing for exhibitionism here.

"There," she says, voice muffled in folds of fabric. "Now we're even."

 

Hollywood sucks you in but it won’t spit me out, no 

**\- Ashlee Simpson, "Boyfriend"**

 

_Is it true you used Jessica's ID before you turned 21?_

\- I did...Sometimes people would say, "You're not Jessica Simpson." I'd answer: "Yeah I am." 

**\- Ashlee Simpson on ivillage.com, December 2005**

 

In an interview for a women's magazine she talks passionately about bullshit standards of female beauty and being happy with your own unique body, loving yourself for who you are. Helps paint a fucking feminist mural, the works. It's great publicity.

By the time that issue hits newsstands she's shed a few more pounds, gotten long blonde extensions and collagen injections, work done on her cheeks and chin and a really quality nosejob; and just like that, for the first time in her life, the boys and the bloggers are paying more attention to her than to Jessica.

It should feel great, but mostly it's making her hate the world a little bit.

The divorce is finalized and Ashlee learns the word "acrimonious." Nick walks away with $10 million of Jessica's money; Daddy shouts a lot and makes Ashlee promise to get a pre-nup "when" she gets married. Ashlee tells him that she _is_ thinking of moving in with her current boy - it's just habit to tell Daddy everything, at this point - and he tells her it's a foolish decision and wrong in God's eyes and barely speaks to her for weeks, even after she gives up and stays put in her own home.

She spends the summer touring and vacationing, dating somebody else and thinking about kissing Pete Wentz, serving as emotional support for a wretched Jessica, and losing _just five more pounds, Mom, I promise._

At the end of the summer she breaks up with her boyfriend. Braxton is the guitarist for Ashlee's backing band, so it’s a little bit messy. Nothing compared to Pete and his hometown girl, though, which - Ashlee doesn't even go there if she can help it.

The next time she bumps into him (and Pete's not even famous, really, but he must know a lot of people because he keeps showing up at the same parties as Ashlee) he doesn't comment on her new face.

Ashlee doesn't know why she should be so invested in the opinion of somebody she just met and barely knows, but whatever. Finally she can't take it anymore.

"So what do you think of the new look?" she says, laughing, over-bright.

Pete looks at her eyes _(the one fucking thing on her face that's still hers)_ and finally says, "You're beautiful. But there's less of you," and she doesn't know what on earth to say to that.

He invites her to come see his band play in LA, and Ashlee says she will.

 

the fuck me red lipstick she wears comes off on her teeth- but she rubs her feet on mine to fall asleep, im not sure anyone knows this. 

**\- Pete Wentz on his blogspot, April 2007**

 

here she comes  
Sunday School girl wanting some 

**\- Ashlee Simpson, "Hot Stuff"**

 

In the VIP booth of some club ("Man, I wouldn't even be able to get in here normally," Pete says) they get sloshed together and Ashlee sort of accidentally ends up giving him a lap dance. Not many people know it, but she's practically expert.

"The fuck did you learn _that?"_ he says foggily as she straddles him, flexing her too-sharp hips to the rhythm and just barely skimming her breasts over his chest, her hair falling in fair ripples around his face. He's really obviously hard, and she hopes there aren't any cameras around. "Aren't you a Texas pastor's daughter, Ashlee Simpson?"

"Ballet school," she breathes. "Call it an extracurricular."

Their corner is dark and he presses his fingers up inside her skirt, hitting silk and slippery nylon, making her sigh despite herself. She can smell herself on him, musky sex scent, and for a strange moment Ashlee wants to laugh - it's so perfect that their first time doing this would be in _public._ Of course it is.

"Here," she says huskily, one hand fumbling with the button of his fly. "Try to be quiet," and that's all the warning she gives him before pulling his dick out, pushing the thin scraps of her underwear out of the way, leaning her forehead against his, and rocking down on him in steady, slow increments. In the darkness, to any casual eye, it should look like she's still dancing.

His eyes are fixed on her face, pupils huge and inky black. He cups her breasts in his hands and mouths along her neck, and her hands are tense on his arms but he's so warm inside her.

“Does this mean I’m out of the friend zone?” he asks lightly afterwards, and she zips up her skirt and murmurs, “Not really, sorry.”

She has to throw up, later, and management blocks off the entire bathroom so that she can retch in privacy.

-

Basically, as friends-with-benefits go - and Ashlee's had a few, it's just easier - Pete's a really convenient one. He comes through LA pretty frequently, understands her hectic schedule and is already kind of familiar with the perks and drawbacks of life in this industry, the weird watching-us-watching-them of celebrity -

(She tries to explain all of this to a disapproving-looking Jessica, but all that comes out is, "He does the bits of my hair that I can't reach and he lends me his eyeliner when mine breaks and he's really good at kissing and painting toenails.")

\- and, call her shallow, but that's what Ashlee's looking for right now.

-

She never wanted to be a pop singer, originally - that was Jessica's thing - but in her New York days Ashlee did dream of doing Broadway, and that one’s fulfilled when she gets to play Roxie Hart on the West End. Black-clad and cat-eyed, she taps and tangos her way through a too-familiar landscape of scandals and starlets and razzle-dazzle and the endless thirst for fame.

After the premiere she sneaks away from her family's hugs and congratulations to call Pete, practically vibrating with glee. "They liked me!"

She's the youngest Roxie the production's ever had, and with her prior reputation it's kind of nervewracking - but Ashlee puts in tons of hard work for months, pouts and primps and flirts and screws up her face into silly shapes, sees the sights of London and goes out pub-crawling with the rest of the cast and loves every minute of it.

Pete sends tasteless joke cards that make her laugh, boxes of Kitkat bars when she complains to him that the UK kind just aren't the same, mixtapes that they discuss endlessly over the phone -

"I really liked that Saves The Day song. I've never really heard of them before."

"'Cars and Calories'? Yeah, Patrick said I should put that on there."

\- and, once, what must be the hugest and most extravagant bouquet of pink peonies that's to be had in LA. Ashlee has to really rack her brain to recall an offhand comment about favorite flowers that she made to Pete months and months ago. She's touched by the expensive blossoms but more so by the accompanying note in Pete's late-night chickenscratch: _the all wise internet informs me tht these suckers are supposed to cure lunatics & keep away nitemares. i approve of yr taste_

She makes the mistake of telling Mom about one of Pete's random gifts, and next thing she knows, Jessica is on her back to get them to Define The Relationship, an annoying catchphrase left over from their teenage years.

("You really should, sweetie. I mean, you know men."

“I’m not ready."

“But - ohhh. Oh, I see. Playing hard to get? You sneaky girl.”

Ashlee snaps, “No,” and the Skype window fills with Jess's big blue I don’t-get-it eyes.)

Her performance in _Chicago_ gets far better reviews than any album she's ever put out, and when she flies back to the States it's with a newborn sense of confidence, fledgling-frail but _there._ She tells her dad that she's taking a year off, and she sees Pete again.

He's moved out of his parents' house, out of his beloved hometown, and bought a place in the Hollywood Hills. Ashlee resolutely declines to read anything into that. As his friend, wellwisher and occasional bedmate, she's happy he's getting over the whole Peter Pan thing, that's all.

It's funny, though. It's not like they have an _understanding_ or anything, but as far as she can tell he hasn't actually slept with anyone else since she left.

Come to think of it, neither has she.

Ashlee's heart tells her: _Shit._

 

I thought I'd never find someone as crazy as myself 

**\- Ashlee Simpson, "That's Why I Love You"**

 

i found a love when i was looking for madness. 

**\- Pete Wentz on his blogspot, June 2007**

 

The first time he calls her in the middle of a four-day sleepless freakout Ashlee makes the drive on over and crawls into his bed and holds him while he jolts between mind-racing rambles and periods of near-catatonia. She gathers that it's a service Pete's various significant others have been providing for years.

Ashlee's not entirely sure how to handle such naked anguish. She's someone who really truly tries to believe in the power of positive thinking, so she goes with that: soft platitudes plus lots of touching. Pete huddles into her, hot stale breath, unwashed, and mumbles things like _without makeup you remind me of when I was little in the summer_ before finally, mercifully passing out.

The second time it happens, she's in Australia and there is absolutely no question of her coming and fixing him like the others always have. Instead she tries to stay upbeat and businesslike on the phone, advising shower, hydration, snack, meds, cuddle time with Hemmy and old cartoons, lunch out with a friend ("not a Hollywood one. You know what I mean"), a shopping stroll, and a nap, hoping that she can help hold him up while he takes his first faltering steps toward fixing himself.

-

A little after three, lame music and too many famous faces and their drunk companions acting like assholes, he snags her hand and whispers, "Want to get out of here?"

"I thought you'd never ask," Ashlee replies, and then, with a glance toward the security-choked front doors and a tired attempt at chirpiness, "Better put your camera face on!"

She fumbles in her purse, reapplies her lip gloss in a nervous tic that she can't seem to get rid of, as she starts the paparazzi spiel that Daddy drummed into her head years and years ago. “Remember, okay, just like the crazies in New York - head down, one-word answers, don't be controversial, don't make eye contact, it only encourages them. But don't be rude either, try to remember they're just doing their job like you and me, we depend on them as much as they depend on us -"

Pete wrinkles his nose, and leads her in the wrong direction.

“Hey, where are you going?” This is her confused giggle.

“So not in the mood for it, baby." It’s the first time he’s called her that, and she likes it from his lips. "You?"

Ashlee blinks at the notion of missing such an easy photo op, but it's - shit, it's tempting. She's used to the paps by now, but when faced with them she'll always feel like she's back in Texas with the sidewalk boys who used to catcall at Jessica's breasts. Deep down she sometimes suspects that she's not really cut out to be a celebrity.

She shakes her head slowly, and Pete raises his eyebrows all mischievous-like and pulls her into a back hallway by the bathrooms. Then he's holding open a grimy little side door for her - some kind of employee exit? - and she ducks under his arm, giggling for real this time.

“Okay, car’s a ways up the block - see, aren’t you glad now that we didn’t go for the valet? - okay, let's move -”

The heavy club beat fades behind them as they make their way quickly toward Ashlee's black SUV down the street. The stiletto staccato of her heels echoes in the parking lot, and she sees a couple of heads turn nearby.

"Shit!" she exclaims, and Pete’s beside her, stupid donkey laugh in her ear, hands on her waist urging her along, "go go go!" like a war movie. Ashlee reaches down and snatches off her shoes; carrying them in one hand, tossing Pete her keys with the other, she makes a break for it. They slam the vehicle doors with seconds to spare, and Ashlee drops her shoes and collapses snickering into the seatback. Pete steps hard on the gas and exits with a screech of tires, making sure to yell something rude at the photog ten steps behind them.

“Made it, we totally fucking made it!” Ashlee crows, bopping along to the Pretenders on the stereo. She’s thrumming with the adrenaline of unexpected adventure, and okay, maybe a little tipsy still. “You, Peter, you are my white knight tonight.”

He attempts a courtly bow over the steering wheel. “Where to, milady?”

She waves a hand, still singing along gleefully. “Anywhere, hell, just take me awaaaaaaay.”

He kisses her on the nose and pulls out into traffic, and twenty minutes later they're taking the curves of Mulholland at 70, windows down and music up, stars and the clean night wind in her hair.

 

dont you dare tell me about true fucking love. i spit and punched and bled for it. and now i want to sleep inside of it. 

**\- Pete Wentz on his blogspot, June 2007**

 

I like it better when it hurts 

**\- Ashlee Simpson, "Lala"**

 

They still haven't officially Defined The Relationship or whatever, but when the fresh new year rolls around Pete calls it quits with Jeanae for good and devotes his full energies to a highly enthusiastic pursuit of Ashlee.

"If I had airplane phobia as bad as him, I sure as hell wouldn't be flying all over the globe chasing some...some pop princess with trust issues," Ashlee confides helplessly to the girls. "I don't even know, you guys."

A grainy snap of them kissing at a Vegas club finds its way to the gossip blogs. Ashlee's dad has never responded very well to any boyfriend that he hasn't also been, like, the manager of, so she goes the Deny Everything route. Pete follows suit, like he'd do anything to preserve a tiny cocoon of growing space for whatever-it-is that's springing up between them, and she's grateful.

She knows he must be frustrated. She's willing to make out for hours behind the privacy of tinted glass, but introduces him with a firm "my friend," always. She'll grind on his lap in the VIP booth after she's had a few, but damned if she'll say she _likes_ him. It's like ninth grade all over again, only backwards. At the Grammys she holds his hand, but she's also in the habit of holding hands with her girlfriends and sister when they go out, so it's safe; it doesn't have to mean anything.

His band's playing Europe but he's got some time off in late March, and Ashlee calls to invite him to fly out to Cabo San Lucas, where she's staying in the palatial vacation home of some friends, getting a little sunshine in between commitments. Within the space of the next twelve hours, she freaks out and calls back saying she's changed her mind; spends half the day on the beach trying to clear her head, write in her journal like she has every day since her early teens, argue with herself and figure out what's going on; gets her period and feels like a giant fucking girly cliché (though deep down she knows that that's not all of it); and calls _again_ and tells him she's sorry, asks him to please come after all.

-

When he arrives he comes out to find her on the pool deck, looking all hesitant and hopeful in that stupidly endearing puppy-eyed way, and Ashlee pads over in her oversize t-shirt and Crocs and kisses him desultorily before flopping down full-length on a sun lounger. "How was your flight?"

"It was all right." Pete scrubs a hand over his stubbly jaw. "I think I had my first solo paparazzo-type experience."

"Oh, exciting, what happened?"

"I was just getting coffee in the airport and the dude realized it was just me without you but _he took pictures anyway_." Pete shakes his dark head in disbelief. "It was extremely fucking weird."

Ashlee makes a face, half from that news and half from the cramps under her t-shirt. "So, hey. Wanna _not_ go out into town tonight? Or like, show our faces outside this place at all?"

"I was thinking we could watch movies and make out," Pete agrees, plopping down beside her and tickling the backs of her bare knees until she has to kick him. "Live the high life a little."

In the media room Ashlee puts in her favorite movie of all time. It's the story of some random comic geek who gets set up with a gorgeous call girl, only they end up falling in love all of a sudden and getting married, only then they have to run away from her evil, abusive pimp and get mixed up in a bunch of drugs and drama and eventually escape down south with their baby son. It's seriously amazing but she _has_ seen it a million times, so she's totally up for the promised making out.

She's also up for the groping that that turns into as soon as Pete realizes she's not wearing a bra - fuck, she missed his hands - but when his fingers slide up to the sides of her panties she whispers, "Fuck, sorry," closing her legs tight and looking apologetically up at him. "Sorry, but -"

He looks flushed and frustrated but pulls away at once, more gentlemanly than she expected. "Sorry, is it - did I - you okay?"

"Yeah, no, of course," she hastily reassures him. "It's just - not tonight, it's just the wrong...that time, sorry."

She’s dealt with more awkward romantic situations, but Ashlee’s still half expecting him to back up and start talking about some completely unrelated subject in a loud hearty voice, like Daddy always did in his house full of women. Instead, Pete's expression clears. "Oh, that all?"

And there he goes _touching her_ again. Ashlee knows that the gaping-jaw look isn't her most attractive, but she can't help it. "Pete, what - that’s not even - is that _sanitary?"_

Pete just laughs: unexpectedly low and wicked, it sends a dark thrill right through the core of her. Then he’s easing the silky black boyshorts down like it's nothing, like she isn't fucking _bleeding_. "Let me?" He wraps his hands round Ashlee’s ankles and skims them approvingly up her bare legs, all the way. "Chill out, baby, I don't mind, I like it."

"Oh my God, what is wrong with you," Ashlee says, disbelieving, and jumps at the first cold touch of his nose along her pubic bone. "But I’m all disgusting!”

His lips and tongue are warmer, much warmer, and she hisses in delight when he speaks against her flesh. "I've had so much worse things in my mouth, baby" - she laughs despite herself - "it’s no big deal," and his head goes down.

She’s unprepared for how much more intense than usual the feeling is, entirely unprepared for the rush of lust when Pete looks up from between her half-spread legs to ask, "Okay?" and she looks at his mouth smeared red, red, red. It’s seriously so fucking gross, but she can't seem to stop making these longing little noises in the back of her throat.

"Yeah," she pants, nodding furiously, and he holds her eyes as he licks along his lower lip, reaches up and kisses her so lightly before dipping his head again. Ashlee tastes copper.

She's never going to live down the fact that the first time she looked at Pete Wentz and thought _hey, he might be a keeper_ was through a disconcerting blur of hypersensitized arousal and horrified fascination as his tongue curled delicately between her thighs, drawing blood.

-

He wakes her up in the middle of the tropic night to ask her, _Do you know what it's like to hate yourself so much you'd break your own bones, cut the skin from them if you could?_ and she just laughs shortly and taps the side of her perfect nose. It takes Pete a minute.

 _Go back to sleep,_ she says, _babe, if you can,_ and he curls up against her skinny shoulders and tries.

-

When he has to leave again, go back on tour, she surprises the hell out of both of them by beginning to cry.

 

 

everyone  
is either full of diet pills or shit.  
and usually its both. 

**\- Pete Wentz on his blogspot, May 2007**

 

im sorry baby. my heart is clumsy. but i love you in a holding your hair back kind of way. 

**\- Pete Wentz on his blogspot, May 2007 (next entry)**

 

"Oh no, I got over that _years_ ago," she assures him breezily, and will not listen when Pete spits in frustration, "It's not like the fucking fourth-grade chicken pox, Ash."

Still, she "forgets" to eat, finds herself "too busy" for meals, and when Pete catches her in front of the mirror - pinching handfuls of what she calls fat and he calls skin, that old silent implacable _something_ flaring behind her mirror-double's gaze - she sees his arms twitch like he wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, like he wants to wrap her up tight and fly her away from all of this.

"Do you have to be so goddamn driven about _this,_ too?" is all he says.

-

That spring Ash gives him the keys and security codes to her new home in Beverly Hills so that they can have what Pete charmingly calls “sleepovers," and he introduces her to his band as his girlfriend.

Patrick eyes her suspiciously - for all the world like a little kid who's just waiting for you to break the favorite toy he lent you - while Pete leaves to go harass an assistant for some drinks. But Ashlee didn't master all those networking skills for nothing, and by the time he gets back, she's already got Patrick swapping stories with her about vocal nodes and working with Timbaland and rare Aretha Franklin b-sides and Stupid Things Pete Did Once. All of Pete's hero-worship kind of had her expecting someone a lot more intimidating, pretentious maybe, and Ashlee is surprised and pleased.

Hanging out with the band a few weeks later, her and Joe trying in vain to teach Hemmy to shake paws, she overhears Patrick telling Pete, "She's really cute, dude - way out of _your_ league -" (Pete laughs ruefully) "and she seems really sweet, but I honestly don't have a clue what the two of you see in each other...And that's how I know it must be true love or whatever, right?"

Patrick, he gets it.

-

Somebody once said that Hollywood is like high school with money, and it holds true for celebrity relationships. _So I heard from Courtney/Kimberly/Dlisted/Perez that you said such-and-such about me in P.E. class/soccer practice/Cosmopolitan/U.S. Weekly..._

Her public image largely depends on glossing over misbehavior and unhappiness, on presenting a nonthreatening, people-pleasing facade of shiny wholeness. His public image largely depends _on_ misbehavior and unhappiness. It's not exactly a match made in heaven.

"I don’t think my fans like you very much," she informs him over Starbucks; he grins crookedly and says, "Same," and she drains her latte with a decisive slurping sound.

"You give them too much of you," she tells him later, when he's fuming over a bad interview. "What you have to do is create, like. A cartoon character of yourself? Cartoon Pete Wentz, Ashlee Simpson, whatever. It's a little bit you, but not really. And then they look at _that,_ write about _that_ , laugh at _that_ , and meanwhile -"

"- the real you keeps on doing your own thing, behind the cardboard cutout," Pete finishes. "Undisturbed."

"Yes, exactly."

"You're smarter than you look," he jokes, and then looks like he wishes he could take it back.

Ashlee just laughs, wryly sings a hook from one of her own songs: _she said, you're smart, but in a stupid way..._

 

hey girl screaming for attention  
once you get it you throw it away... 

**\- Ashlee Simpson, "Give It All Away"**

 

maybe I'll grow up and be good someday

**\- Ashlee Simpson, "Smart In A Stupid Way"**

 

She accompanies Pete to the opening of his bar in New York. It's her first time meeting a bunch of his friends at once, and yeah, she's scared.

She knocks herself out to look hot and ends up looking like Jessica; she wraps herself all around Pete and is quiet and clingy all night. She drinks far too many vodka-redbulls and practically gropes him in all the pictures and then spends half an hour throwing up. Pete doesn't even consider emptying the bathrooms (tiny, dive-y, unisex) for her; but he does stay by her side through the gauntlet of photographers, and he doesn’t laugh or scoff or argue or try to make her “see reason” when, drunk and sleepy, she tells him all about the thing that she firmly believes she encountered in that house two years ago.

"I know, I _know_ it sounds crazy, but, I swear. In my head I still think of her by the name I gave her, even," she confides; she's wobbling against him, and he tightens his grip on her hand a little. "Shelly."

"Shelly?" This little smile quirks his lips up at the corners. Not mocking, she thinks, and it's making her feel soft and squishy inside - or maybe that's just the alcohol.

"Shelly," she says again, nodding until her head feels too heavy to go on. "The little ghost girl."

"Ashlee, Shelly," Pete says softly, pushing the names together like he's making introductions, slurring them into one. "Shelly, Ashlee."

He does laugh when she tells him about her first kiss, “right outside the bus that my _parents_ were sitting in, back then they were still touring with me, and then I had to face them right afterwards and everything, it was so awkward," but that’s okay, he was supposed to.

-

"Do you not like my friends or something?" Pete asks her once, early on, after they've made their exit from a house party somewhere in the Midwest. He looks kind of distressed, and Ashlee leans her swimmy head on his shoulder so she doesn't have to meet his eyes.

"That's not it," she says, and pauses too long, searching for the language to describe what "it", in fact, is. Pete's a pretty big fish in his own little pond, one that Ashlee always feels kind of weird dipping her toes into. She supposes they're all relatively normal people living relatively normal lives - mostly they're not Hollywood material and never will be, but move instead through the "scenes" of Jersey, Vegas, New York, Chicago, and the strange no-man's-land of the internet - which in itself means that Ashlee's never met anyone like them. She doesn't really get their filthy vocabularies and filthier stories, their willingness (eagerness!) to hang out in what look to her like total dumps, or the all-out balls-to-the-wall loyalty that Pete so clearly holds for them.

"Look, it's like," she says finally, feeling drunk and dumb and bad with words. "I was raised to talk about God when you were sober and sex when you were wasted. As far as I can tell, in your world or whatever, it's basically the other way round." She rubs mascara from the corners of her eyes, winces at the gritty itch of it. "Does that make sense?"

Pete stares at her, then laughs, rough and delighted. "I think that's the best summary of the culture wars I've heard in years, babe."

"Also," Ashlee adds thoughtfully, "it probably doesn't help that I don't really know how to - interact with normal people, anymore, I think."

He strokes her hair and says, "Good thing, 'cause everyone I hang out with is a fucking weirdo."

When it gets serious enough that they stop using condoms and the journalists start using the term "power couple," when she accompanies Pete on tour and he starts blogging about her on a regular basis, it's only then that they go out double-dating with Patrick and his new girlfriend. Ashlee understands that being taken out and shown off to Patrick is something that Pete doesn't do with just anyone, and she feels kind of proud, if also nervous enough to snag a couple of Klonopin from Pete's bathroom before they head out.

Elisa is tiny and elfin-pretty and throws a sympathetic, amused glance at Ashlee when their dates don't even make it through appetizers before falling into an intense discussion, conducted in their own peculiar private idiom, of the new stuff the band is working on. The two of them excuse themselves to the ladies' room together (Pete makes some predictable crack about chicks always having to go in groups) and end up out back by the dumpsters, leaning against the building in their dress clothes, handbags and heels kicked aside as they furtively share Elisa's Parliaments and laugh through a smoke haze about whether the champagne here could _be_ any worse, how regrettably non-buzzed they are right now and how badly that needs to change, and the superiority of Bjork to the crap on the sound system inside.

Pete helps Ashlee make a homemade dish for that month's potluck-style "dinner party" with the girls, an old tradition of theirs, and she's so pleased with how it turns out that she brings him along. Later, at girls' night, Stephanie pronounces him "a good one."

She tilts her head thoughtfully, adds another sweeping brushstroke to one of the bright, silly canvases that they've got set up out on Ashlee's balcony. "Kind of greasy, though. No offense," and Ashlee chokes on a swig of wine, she's laughing so hard.

Lauren says to her, later, when they're drunk enough to be honest, "He really must be into you if he's putting up with your dad, honey," and that's not something Ashlee would hear from anyone else, but it doesn't make it less true.

-

On different sides of the Atlantic, they set up "date nights" on which they marathon Disney movies "together" (shorthand for syncing up their respective copies of the movie and watching in tandem) while talking over Skype.

“Dude, so I'm at your house, and - was that Demi Moore I just saw out front?”

“Yeah, probably, she and Ashton live around the corner. Did I forget to tell you?”

A huff of laughter. "I don't know when my life got this surreal."

As the credits of _Lady and the Tramp_ roll, they've moved on to making fun of the latest set of pap shots:

"Oh, shit, check out that last one. How fucking constipated is my _face_?"

"I'm just wondering how you let me walk out the door in that skirt, babe, for real -"

"Hey, no, own those fashion crimes, you're an independent kind of girl." He's laughing across the ocean at her. "Look, at least you don't look like you haven't slept for months in these, okay. - Wait, just a sec - oh, _shit,_ I gotta go. Soundcheck." She can practically hear his face fall. "Sorry, kitkat. I'll try to get a hold of you after the show?"

"Okay."

"Okay then."

"iloveyou,” she says, really really fast, and hangs up before he can respond.

 

"When everything’s gone - the cameras, your makeup, this, that - there’s this empty feeling,” [Ashlee] says. “Did all these people working with me today really care about me? Was that real? What’s real, what’s not real? My music: Am I good enough? Everyone’s looking at me, but I’m looking inward, and it’s so weird.” 

She stares at the floor, then snaps her eyes back up. “It’s just part of the job. You have to forget that part.” 

**- _Blender,_ December 2005**

 

I saw you without makeup. Without your hair perfect. Without the words you bend to make me see you a certain way. I saw you alone and scared and knew I had to be careful with how I held you...I knew I had to meet you in an aisle on a sunday morning. I knew I had to wake up to the biggest eyes I have ever seen for the rest of my life. 

**\- Pete Wentz on his blogspot, January 2007**

 

In one of Pete's million blogs - Ashlee can never keep track of them, doesn't even try - he writes, _i only feel in love on the stage and on the side of a pillow,_ and when she reads it the resonance is painfully immediate, one of those _shit, are you me?_ moments in a relationship, both exhilarating and terrifying. These days she's at her happiest, or close to it, in bed: just lying around with Pete in the few precious hours they can snatch together - recovering from work and complaining that she looks like crap, topless with her sweatpants riding around her hipbones as he paints their nails the same color and Hemmy collapses at their feet like a smelly carpet - makes Ashlee feel almost lovely, almost okay in her own skin, the way she used to when she danced.

It's only once Pete's all but moved in with her, though, that she actually shows him the once-prized toe shoes nestled away in shoeboxes on the top shelf of her childhood closet; her faded tutus packed in tissue paper and cedar.

"Oh, hey," and Pete looks enlightened. "Hence that hoedown thing?"

Even after three years Ashlee doesn't need to ask what he's referring to. She rubs her nose embarrassedly, feeling herself color. "Yeah. I don't - I freaked out and I didn't know what to do. I guess dancing like an idiot is my default."

"You are my favorite dancing idiot," Pete whispers against the sharp edge of her jawline, and he's smiling so wide.

-

Going on tour with Fall Out Boy shows her a whole new side of Pete, maybe her favorite side. He's magnetic onstage, full of energy and fucking beautiful; it makes her wet just watching him up there, and when he comes offstage - high off the sound and stinking of Patrick’s sweat - she can't keep her hands off him.

A couple of times she even braves the moshing crowd up front. It does and does not remind her of dancing. Ashlee's not very good at making her physical presence felt, let alone _aggressive_ ; but she's always been a fake-it-till-you-make-it kind of girl, so she pulls up her hood and jabs out with her bony elbows and pretends that the tight-packed bodies around her are years' worth of photographers and entourages and security and family and fans, pressing in _too - fucking - close_ , and emerges with a satisfying set of bruises.

There's a thousand girls screaming for her man every night, but she's the only one who gets to see his bleary morning face and bedhead and the way he steals her pants to wear and returns them all stretched out.

"Wow, we're already starting to look alike," says Ashlee, laughing at the bathroom mirror, where she and Pete have flat-ironed their bangs in the exact same direction without even meaning to. "This is exciting."

He's busy slapping a homemade sticker on the back of his bass - it says **I ♥ #16** , a reference to this year's Maxim Hot 100, where Ashlee came in high enough above Jessica to make sisterly conversation a little bit stiff lately - but he puts it down and goes to her, skimming his hands over her hips, pressing their temples together. His reflection is starting to show little laugh-lines around the eyes.

From the other end of the bus, there's the sound of a door bursting open. "Yo, dude, where's the wife?" Joe hollers, and Ashlee feels Pete startle at the word. "Patrick sent me something that she _has_ to see -"

-

They're sequestered in his bed on the bus, sharing an old _Rolling Stone_ and reading Kanye's thoughts on homophobia, and she says, "Babe, can I ask you something? Something personal."

"Mmm."

"Have you. Um. Have you ever slept with another guy?"

"A million times." He turns the page, expression bland. "When you're touring in a tiny van..."

"You know what I mean." She makes a face. "Ever fucked a guy?"

"I can't get it up for dick," is Pete's blunt answer.

"Been fucked?" Ashlee's on unfamiliar ground; never before has she dated anyone where this might have been an issue.

"Nope."

"I thought so." She says it with satisfaction, remembering all the "fag!"s that've been thrown at her man (sometimes in her presence, which doesn't even make _sense)._ "It’s not like you even, you know, act gay."

"What the fuck?" Pete sits up, annoyance flashing over his face. "Jesus, Ash."

"Sorry, I -" He hates it when she apologizes, says she does it too much, but suddenly _All my hairdressers totally act the same!_ is sounding pretty weak even inside her head.

"Just - forget it." But he won't meet her eyes as he turns the page of the magazine.

"I didn't mean -"

"It's fine. Forget it."

Twenty pages later she asks, quiet, "Ever been in love with a guy?"

This time he does look at her. "Yeah." Clear, no hesitation.

"Okay." She snuggles back into him. "Awesome, me too."

 

if i could keep you still long enough id slip a rope around your finger or maybe even a silver band. 

**\- Pete Wentz on his blogspot, May 2007**

 

thats why i married this girl. she doesnt care who i am as long as i am me. 

**\- Pete Wentz on petewentz.com, July 2008**

 

When Ashlee was twelve, Daddy tried to do the whole "purity pledge" thing that had worked oh-so-well with Jessica. Ashlee had refused the promise ring he'd offered, stubborn but unable to articulate her reasons any further than, "It's personal." The resulting blow-up was one that, to this day, she doesn't like to think about.

The memory surfaces on the night of her twenty-third birthday -

(They spend the night boogieing around like a pair of total tools in '80s promwear - dancing, Ashlee is always animated and full of laughter, can practically feel herself glowing - and afterwards Pete, looking nervous enough to puke, and prefacing it with a disclaimer that "it's just a promise ring, this isn't the official proposal or anything, I really gotta practice so that it isn't as lame as this is," holds out a hand cupped around a little box)

\- but this time Ashlee says yes, and puts it on.

She likes the ring okay, but a thousand times better is the lullaby that he writes for her, gets tattooed on his arm for Christmas.

-

They never, ever get enough time alone; but they catch each other for a couple of days in New York near the end of February, and have already gone five rounds of reunion sex before Ashlee remembers that she was supposed to renew her birth control.

-

As of tonight they've got forty-some hours left in town together, but Ashlee has cooped herself up in their suite, buried her head in her journal. Pete is stoned out on sleeplessness and prescription withdrawal, but she knows he can still tell that something's up: there's no way he missed her being a giant bitch to the hotel help earlier, always a sure sign that she's in an awful mood.

She curls in on herself, hair hiding her face, and keeps on writing like mad.

"Aw, hey, kitkat," Pete says as he surfs Buzznet for the fiftieth time today, "check out these pics of Patrick with Dirty's kid." He looks over at Ashlee, clearly trying to draw her out. "Still can't believe that bum beat me to the whole reproducing thing. What is he, like twenty-five? I totally thought I'd get there first."

"Yeah?" Her voice in her own ears has a weird timbre to it.

"Well, no," Pete admits. "I actually thought I wouldn't make it this far. The 27 Club, I mean -"

"Yeah." Ashlee can't make herself look up.

"- but assuming I got here, I figured I'd've, you know -"

"I - can't promise to make you a daddy at twenty-five," she says quietly, and the words are wavering so much that Pete turns immediately to look at her. "But if thirty is okay -" Her voice breaks horribly, like acid reflux all over again, and she doesn't know if her meaning has even impacted but he's already moving to gather her up in his arms.

"Seriously?" He sounds just the way she feels: poised on the knife-edge of control. "Oh, God."

"Maybe. I don't know, yet. I fucked up with the pills," she whispers, and she's crying and snickering and hiccuping against his neck, all at the same time, a thoroughly ugly sound that just makes Pete hold her tighter. "Shit, shit, shit."

He says, "Hey, hey, no - that's not, that is not fucking up. _I_ have fucked up with pills, okay," and she laughs shakily into his skin because that's what he was trying for, even though it can't have been fun for him to say. "Don't freak; whatever happens, it's gonna be all right."

She turns her face up to his, can't even care that she's probably a mess of smears and tears. "You know - you know my dad would make us get married for sure, right? Right away? And they'll say, they'll all say -" and Pete kisses her fiercely, says, "Ash. Ash, fuck that, I don't need anyone to _make_ me want to marry you."

-

They order up a bunch of junk food from room service, equal parts celebratory and consoling, and Pete jokes, "I'm gonna go tell the internet now, okay?"

"Ha ha," she says, "hilarious," but somehow ten minutes later he's rambling into a videocamera and, between takes, pestering Ashlee to let him film her with a pillow stuffed up her shirt:

"It'll be funny! C'mon."

Pete's idea of funny is not most people's idea of funny; but Ashlee has always been that girl who laughs at her own lame jokes, so she gets it. “Fine,” she says patiently, “tell me my line again.”

She never really understood all that biological-clock talk until Pete, staring muzzily into the lens, says, "I know what I'll do. I'll make a fuckin' baby,” and all of a sudden Ashlee feels like someone just punched her in the ovaries.

“I’m not announcing it officially until _after_ we’re married, though,” she says, and Pete doesn’t say anything but his eyes are all soft as he cuts the camera over to the bed and tosses her the Cheetos, and Ashlee thinks again, _Shit._

 

it doesnt matter what the proportions are on the girl to my direct right.  
or the way her heart flutters faster than a hummingbird.  
just the way she looks at me sometimes.  
everything about me hangs on that...

**\- Pete Wentz on his blogspot, May 2007**

 

People won't ever see Ashlee the way I do. I feel like a guy who found the end of the rainbow and has the leprechaun tied up in the corner. 

**\- Pete Wentz in _Playboy,_ September 2008**

 

She goes out one day for the first of what will be an endless series of doctor's appointments, and comes home much later with a new tattoo: a big rose-colored flower splashed over her narrow wrist, surrounding the star already there.

"Look, it's a peony!" she tells Pete.

Pete raises his eyebrows in interest and takes her wrist to examine it more closely. "I like it, babe. Why the peony?" He shifts the accent to the first syllable, away from the 'o' where she'd placed it. It's carefully unobtrusive, but Ashlee is still reminded - not for the first time - that he's a hair away from a DePaul degree whereas she never even properly finished high school (unless you count the homeschooling from Mom, and Ashlee loves her mother, she does, but seriously) and yet again she feels that weird Pete-specific mix of admiration and envy, a squirmy defensive feeling under her skin that she tries to ignore.

She shrugs. "I don't know, I just wanted to?" This is her dissembling giggle. "So I'm up to, like, seven now - exciting, right? Daddy's gonna be pissed, haha," and Pete, bless him, doesn't press it. She figures that he, of all people, knows that reasons for getting ink can be super private.

"I lied," she tells him, later, when neither of them can sleep for once. "I did look it up and everything, way back in London when you sent me some."

"Yeah?"

"Uh-huh. It means _shame and hiding_...or _healing."_ She strokes the heel of her little hand against his neck, cocks her head to admire the look of the blossom against the thorns. "And supposedly it protects children."

"I hear it's like, Japanese or something, for 'the most beautiful,'" he says, touching her wrist so gently, and that night he asks her to marry him for real.

-

The morning after, Ashlee has a radio interview. She's exhausted and shell-shocked, but she's a professional, so she does it, giggly and giddy and trying to head off any questions about her personal life because she's terribly afraid that if she's not careful she might just mess up and blurt out the big news to their whole listening audience.

Immediately the word on the street is that she was drunk on-air. Too easily hurt as always, filled with the old smarting feeling of injustice, Ashlee issues an indignant denial. But it sours things for her, a little, and she doesn't say anything to friends or family for a week. She feels guilty for keeping the news to herself, but she can't tell Mom or Jess no matter how badly she wants to. Despite their best intentions Daddy would hear about it within fifteen minutes, and then all of this - their promise to get married, the maybe-baby - would be the family's, the fans', the media's, a public thing, no longer just this infinitesimal warm secret deep down inside of her.

She goes straight from the obstetrician's to girls' night, and when she has to opt for watercolors over the fumes of oil paint and opt out of the Chardonnay completely, it seems like a good time to spill. Her friends shriek and laugh and cry and cover her in hugs and stay up talking late into the night, and she goes home feeling slightly calmer.

When she confirms it to Pete, it feels like telling a friend, too. She's not sure if that's what it's supposed to be like, but it is.

The first thing he does is grin all over his face and whip out his iPhone. Of course. Ashlee can just pick up Patrick's bleary voice on the other end: "'lo?"

"Patrick! Dude! I just, fucking - I totally did knock her up after all."

"Whoa." From what Ashlee can hear Patrick sounds overwhelmed, sincere, a little wistful. "Seriously? Dude." There's a long pause. "I - shit. That's monumental. Congratulations." And then, "Are you crying?"

-

They start planning it weeks before he officially asks her dad for her hand in marriage. Ashlee pushes back the album release date once, twice. Probably her priorities are awful, but she's way more interested in imagining up a wedding right now, honestly.

She was never the type to dream about that as a girl, but now it's different for some reason. Ashlee twists the heavy diamond around and around on her finger in dreamy surprise, thinks, _if he's Peter Pan finally growing up then I'm Alice lost in a weird wild wonderland,_ and proceeds from there.

Pressed for the details of the proposal, for information on the state of her uterus, she gives a thousand coy deflections that all amount to _no, that's mine._

"You announce it whenever the fuck you feel like it, Ash," Pete agrees. And then goes and denies it flat-out to the press, which was not exactly Ashlee's game plan, but she appreciates the intent (especially with Daddy - sorry, “a source” - leaking hints about the wedding and pregnancy left and right).

She can't seem to stop checking her figure in the mirror, constantly asking, "Am I showing yet?"

People think it's so cute. Ashlee can't even begin to explain how wrong they are, how shitty it makes her feel. Mom always said that visibly pregnant brides are totally tacky, but the wedding is fast approaching and Ashlee's wearing a healthy second-trimester baby on a very small frame. Right after the release of “Bittersweet World” the morning sickness hits in nasty bouts, and she loathes herself for the fact that, as the first of many pricey meals goes down the toilet, all she can think is _at least I'm getting rid of those calories._

Pete is anxious, solicitous, considerate, all the things he should be, but Ashlee goes home alone that night. Lower than she’s felt in years, she walks into her enormous closet, sits down quietly in a corner and stays there all night through, a tiny bedraggled ball of misery amid rows and rows of pretty clothes.

 

He's one of my best friends...and it's something that makes me happy. 

**\- Ashlee Simpson on alloy.com, April 2008**

 

but me  
im just young  
dumb  
and full of love

**\- Pete Wentz on his blogspot, April 2008**

 

Tonight Pete won't stop messaging her. Just the same thing, over and over. _are u sure are u sure are u sure_

Ashlee does the schedule calculations, figures that his plane should have landed by now, and calls. “I said yes and I meant it," she tells him between yawns. "Stop worrying, babe, I can practically hear you from LA."

“I just. I'm still kind of a fuckup and a basket case and a nobody, and you could have anyone you want.” He’s talking way too fast. “You’re beautiful and rich and famous and you're so young still -”

She laughs, sleep-throaty. "That's nothing, my mom was married at 18."

"Really?”

“Yeah. Daddy was her youth pastor, that's how they met.”

Pete makes this noise like he might be biting back a horrified exclamation.

“I know,” Ashlee says anyway, sighing, more resigned than defensive. “Oh, Texas.”

His flight gets back late, well after she’s gone to bed - always so _tired_ these days - but Ashlee wakes up halfway at the sound of the door. She's vaguely aware of Pete, shadowy above her, leaning across the broad expanse of sheets to smooth his hand across her hair and drop a kiss on her forehead, bend down and put his face close to her belly for a muffled _goodnight, kiddo_. Then he draws away, rolls over, and the omnipresent tapping of keys begins.

She's just about to go under again when his phone goes off. When he answers it makes Ashlee blink, because Pete's tone is a very particular one that she hasn't heard since the early days of their friendship.

"Jeanae. What's the occasion?"

Ashlee struggles to stay awake in the dark behind her eyelids.

"You saw that. Yeah. Yeah, we posted the official thingy - announcement - a few days back."

There's a very long pause then. No matter how hard she strains her ears, Ashlee can't pick up the other side of the conversation. Possibly that's a good thing.

"I don't have to justify her to anyone," Pete says finally, softly. "But I will to you. Because."

And Ashlee absolutely cannot stay awake any longer, is drifting, but scraps of quiet monologue filter down into her sleep: _She's like me - stands up for the people she loves, whether they deserve it or not. She thought my closetful of animal suits was, and I quote, 'totally rad.' She has this crazy low voice you don't expect, and she's a big fan of her own boobs._ A hint of laughter, and then something that sounds suspiciously like a description of Ashlee's pre-show ritual (ninja dancing, platonic girl-kissing, positive energy sharing and, in honor of her dancing days, shouted profanity). _The first time I met her she looked so - she was just this thin uncomfortable-looking girl, nobody's picture of flawless blonde popstar at all, and I felt, just - **drawn** to that, to her, so much._ Something about rolling with the punches, picking herself back up every time. Something else about unapologetic cheesiness. _She's a better actor than me, in, like, every sense. Way too good at covering up with a smile. By my count she actually has ten different smiles, and nine of them are fake, but the last one makes up for everything..._

-

She's not the one under the influence, but she can't stop laughing anyway. "You are going to owe me _forever_ for bringing up my vagina at a _White House Dinner."_

"Technically the _afterparty_ -"

"I can't even believe you." Ashlee's fucking _rolling_ in the backseat of the limo, crushing the hell out of her rustly dress, strands escaping from her updone hair. "Oh, Peter, what am I going to do with you?"

"That champagne really got to me," Pete slurs, smiling hopefully at her. "Sorry?"

Ashlee gives up and yanks at the pins in her scalp, shakes the whole mess down around her shoulders - she's been plucked and shaved and waxed and depilated and exfoliated, ironed, curled, sprayed and diffused, awash in toners and astringents and creams and powders and liners and glosses, but nevertheless sometimes she remembers that gawky little tomboy inside. "Next time, just remember to say 'fianceé', okay? None of this 'girlfriend' shit."

"Okay," he agrees, nuzzling drunkenly into her shoulder. "I do appreciate your vagina, though, I meant that."

She really hopes that laughing this hard is okay for the baby.

 

Maybe in a different universe we'd be some hot couple, but not in this one. 

**\- Pete Wentz in _Rolling Stone,_ March 2007**

 

The guests entered a wedding wonderland underneath a massive white tent...Says Pete: "We wanted people to feel like they stepped into a topsy-turvy world." 

**- _People_ , June 2008**

 

In the house bought with Jessica's money, in the middle of her old bedroom, she holds her back straight and still and lets her bridesmaids help lace her up. "Not too tight," Stephanie cautions, as Lauren checks the fit around Ashlee's hips. "Let that little baby breathe," and they share a smile.

Jessica lays well-manicured hands right where Ashlee’s stomach is beginning to go convex instead of concave, coos, "Oh my gosh, you're getting soooooo _big,_ Ash," and it makes a black snake-thing rouse itself inside Ashlee's skull, uncurl sick and hot behind her eyes.

Hastily she hitches on her blankest, prettiest smile.

"I know, right? Pete keeps talking to it, he wants it to know his voice," she says. "It's so sweet, Jess. You have _no_ idea."

Her sister smiles back, prettily, blankly.

-

He's not supposed to see her in her gown or whatever, but when Ashlee ducks into one of the bathrooms to pop a couple of xanies before the ceremony, who should she find but Pete at the sink doing the same thing.

They stare at each other for a second before breaking out into rueful laughter. Pete slips the little orange bottle into his breast pocket and holds out a hand, and Ashlee shoves her voluminous skirt up around her thighs and fucks him quick and hard, bathed in sunset light, up against the French windows like an I-dare-you to the helicopters that have been hovering low over the house for the past twelve hours.

He makes his escape in the nick of time before the girls come looking for her, all sniffly smiles and affectionate pestering: "Geez, Bridechilla, aren't you done powdering your nose _yet?"_

"No nose jokes, please," says Ashlee primly, and breaks up giggling when they look at her.

-

Jessica was a virgin at her wedding, and made damn sure everyone knew it, too; Ashlee's sex-sore and already showing when she walks down the aisle. Still she's never felt more guiltless or guileless or blessedly clean, more like a child herself, than under the heavy scent of black magic roses. It's too weird to see Daddy crying, so she focuses instead on the way the lights gild Pete's hair.

Their wedding kiss goes on way, _way_ too long for decorum.

"Tell your dad sorry," Pete murmurs later when they're cutting the teapot-tophat-stopwatch-flowerpot cake, "to go all 'November Rain' video on him," and she giggles, shakes her head at him and goes in for another one.

Later he spins her on the dancefloor, careful already with the way he holds her, mouthing along with the song, _I'm glad I didn't die before I met you_ , and her belly's growing heavy but her feet are light.

_maybe this time is different - I mean I really think you like me_

She can't drink at the reception, of course, nor smoke up with half the wedding party (security, which didn't allow in so much as a cellphone camera, apparently had no problem with the quarter of NorCal chronic in the possession of one Joe Trohman) but Pete makes her s'mores on her bridal night, grins at her around a sticky mess of marshmallow, and she loves him for it. In the darkness he curls his hands into her hair, says, "Hey, so - you're gonna be a humongous fucking upgrade for the Wentz family Christmas card, you know. I'm pretty stoked," and when he smiles she can feel it mirrored on her own face, unrestrained and dazzling.

She dreams that Pete recorded footage of the ceremony and leaked it for the publicity, only when her dream-self watches the tape it's nothing but long sweeping shots of Ashlee standing out in the wide open spaces of the desert - a world away from the stuffy, scented closeness of the wedding tent - with one hand resting low on her stomach, dry wind blowing her gown around the swell of her breasts and her hair swirling about her like a curtain of flame, close-up after close-up of great gray-green eyes.

 

You do what you gotta do, but for me, I think marriage is a hard thing to get through. 

**\- Ashlee Simpson in _Seventeen,_ March 2006**

 

I was skipping around all night like, Oh my God, I'm a wife! 

**\- Ashlee Simpson in _People,_ June 2008**

 

Pete tells this radio show that they're honeymooning DIY-style in his basement, or some ridiculous shit like that, and flies them both off to Turks and Caicos while the paparazzi camp outside his house in vain. Ashlee is delighted.

She takes as many hours alone on the beach as she thinks she can get away with (comes back with slight thonged tan lines on her feet from all the flip-flop-wearing in the sun, and Pete traces and kisses them until she asks him, giggling, if it's some kind of _thing_ ). The rest of the time she spends holed up with Pete in their room, ordering room service and playing Monopoly. Ashlee giggles and ditzes around the board and says she isn't any good, but ends up kicking his ass almost every time anyway.

For him she wears matching polka-dot lingerie and lets her long hair fall down her back in waves; Pete takes pictures all sprawled across the bed, tells her she looks like a vintage pin-up girl, and in those moments - pregnant or not - she feels fucking sexy.

A call from LA in the wee hours of the morning wakes them both; Pete has to get up and go bail out Travis's cousin over the phone or something, and Ashlee _hmph_ s and yanks her pillow over her head. When he comes back to bed some hours later, baggy-eyed, she mumbles, “How's this shit always happening to you?" and doesn't remember any of it in the morning.

-

"It's entirely up to you," Pete says, when she asks him.

"But do you want me to?" Ashlee presses.

"What do _you_ want? You do get to choose, you know."

Daddy thinks she shouldn't change it. "Tradition's all very well, sweetie," his voice booms over the transatlantic connection, "but you've got a brand name to consider, you know? Product recognition."

Even to herself Ashlee cannot, will not admit the fierce alien desire to jettison every shred of the past and flee to Chicago with Pete, with their baby, leaving everything about the Simpson name half a country behind - nor the corollary voice that's telling her to turn and run from the new and scary and question-filled world Pete's laid open to her, to crawl right back into the safe suffocating womb-space of her family.

"Ashlee Wentz," she muses, instead. "I like the sound of that."

In the end she compromises, husband's for private and hyphenation for public, and tries hard to shake the feeling that her whole damn life is nothing but one compromise after another, that it all adds up to fatally compromising her own self.

"I think it's a great tradition," she tells the magazines. "Something a woman should do when she gets married," and when any other reasons threaten to clarify in her conscious mind, Ashlee bats them away like cold slimy creatures flitting around her head.

She can change everything from her face to her name, but she can't ever seem to get away from where she's been.

-

"Practice for baby, right?" Pete says when they bring Rigby home, smiling crookedly at her, and Ashlee says, "Oh my God, we're going to have a kid and two dogs. Like _grown-ups,"_ and feels like she used to right after she'd launched into a grande jeté: body flung into a beautiful suspension, leaping but not to fall.

 

My wife's pain and talent and ideas ground me completely.

**\- Pete Wentz in the _Courier-Mail,_ October 2008**

 

'cause the broken in you doesn't make me run 

**\- Ashlee Simpson, "Say Goodbye"**

 

The album does poorly, ticket sales worse, and her dad is pretty pissed. He brought in all the best people, at no small expense, for this one, and now he's going to have to put his energies into Jessica's "country" makeover instead. Another day, another image retooling; Ashlee's more than used to it by now. But she's honestly more relieved than anything to cancel her tour and do "the little wife thing" - in between shilling footwear and shit to make up the losses on _Bittersweet World_ , of course - while Pete heads out to work every morning and returns every evening, triumphant in another successful day of MTV taping or recording under the radar with Fall Out Boy, to her and to the baby.

"It kicks like a fucking soccer player," he marvels; but Ashlee imagines its every movement made glissade-graceful through the liquid suspension inside her, and across their big, empty house she sends him texts to _come upstairs, hurry, baby's dancing again._

Heavy with child, she finally feels able to say, "Please respect my space, guys," to the shoving, jostling paparazzi outside restaurants. When that doesn't work, so much, she brings Pete along and he bawls at them to MOVE OVER, SHE'S FUCKING PREGNANT.

Her expanding body is at once the best and worst thing that's ever happened to her. She knows that Pete loves the ripe new swell of her breasts, the thickening curve of her waist and the softer lines of her face; but he must see the matching touch of unhappiness in her eyes, because he lends her his hoodies to swaddle herself in (she takes a stupid kind of comfort in the fact that they're still giant on her, and it's not like Pete is a big dude himself) and compliments her rack whenever he gets a chance, cups and squeezes and sucks her in bed until she has to laugh at him.

She still feels pinched and guilty when she eats, but she tells the blogosphere to quit judging the weight of _pregnant women_ already, and she buys a bunch of crazy flowing sundresses that show off the baby bump like she's proud of it. Pete tells her she looks like a Greek goddess, rubs her back and feeds her green olives with his fingers. He plays a lot of Fall Out Boy for her belly on the principle that negative four months is not too young an age to get acquainted with the magic that is Patrick’s voice.

Ashlee plays it _Jagged Little Pill_ "about a million times," as she overhears Pete telling Nick Scimeca. "Yeah, I don't even know, dude, pregnant women are fucking inexplicable."

 

...i love her. in a backyard, lying on the couch on a sunday kind of way. one that is not explained or thought out. 

**\- Pete Wentz on his blogspot, June 2007**

 

Et, comme chaque jour je t'aime davantage, Aujourd'hui plus qu'hier et bien moins que demain _[And because I love you more and more each day, today more than yesterday but less than tomorrow]_

**\- Pete Wentz on his blogspot, March 2008**

 

"Are you tired? Do you want to go home?" Pete asks, leaning in close to be heard over the ambient noise.

Ashlee, transfixed by the gorgeous drag queen sauntering by, shakes her head listlessly no.

Stopping by the new Angels & Kings on GLBT night, she's tiresomely sober and a little claustrophobic, if not quite as bored as she expected to be. At least Pete is foregoing drinking or working the room in favor of staying by her side, trying ineffectually to shield her with his stupid tiny body from the crowd crushing in. She knew he was fiercely loyal once he loved someone, fiercely protective of those loved ones, but now that she's pregnant it's like, times ten. When the cameras get up in her face - and they do, they always do, it's an occupational hazard - he gets tense, antsy, territorial, clutches her hand too hard; and the one time someone managed to get onto their property, Pete damn near crashed the car trying to defend "my family."

She thinks back to that one show where he got into a fistfight over her honor or some shit. It scared her at the time, and was totally inappropriate, of course, completely unprofessional; but when she saw him afterwards, all panting and sweating and bleeding, for _her,_ she'd gotten him back to their hotel room right away and couldn't even wait for him to get out of the shower before she jumped him.

Now Pete's got that _I know you too well for this_ look in his eyes, and Ashlee exhales and nods her head yes.

"I really just want to stay in for the rest of my life," she admits tiredly, already anticipating the months to come, when she won't be able to bear being seen in public much, when she'll be able to quit the endless parades of airports and private cars and the too-close convergence of photogs for a little while, be able to curl up at home and pretend she's a normal person. Rewatch _True Romance_ over and over again, do arts and crafts with her girlfriends and get spoiled by Mom and Jess, cuddle Rigby and sleep a whole bunch and yell from room to room with Pete:

"Orange." "No, Pear." "Orange!" _"Pear!"_

(Yesterday Pete spent an hour poring over childhood photos of a wee snowboot-and-tutu-clad Ashlee before announcing that he hopes the kid gets her original nose. This is because Ashlee married a douchebag.)

"Okay," Pete says immediately. "I'll tell our driver," and he drops a hand onto her shoulder, signals their security guy to keep an eye on Ashlee, before darting away through the crowd.

That reminds Ashlee of something, and she takes out her BlackBerry to enter a special number - one that Patrick gave to her, confidentially, as the "pregnancy phone" - and a self-reminder ( _Memo 2 Ash!!_ ) to use it when she goes into labor. "Pete'll be freaking out," Patrick had told her, "and I figure at that point you shouldn't have to deal with all of - that, right," with a handwave presumably meant to illustrate the Peteness of Pete. "I mean, you're just trying to have the fucking baby, here. So just, when it happens and he comes to be with you - any time of the day or night, even if I'm," deep breath, " _even if_ I'm working on the album - have him call this number and I'll pick up and, I don't know, sing that lullaby of yours. Talk him down."

Glancing over the next week's schedule, she notes some business shit, another check-in with the obstetrician, dinner out with her parents and Jess ( _that's_ going to be a laugh and a half, trying her very hardest to keep the conversation away from politics when she and Pete have both publicly declared support for Obama) and a reminder to hit up an exclusive LA sex shop for some, uh, items of interest to herself and Pete -

("The last time I was put in handcuffs," he'd told her once when they were messing around on his bus, "it was over a can of spraypaint," and she'd said, "Someday I want to spraypaint with you," and all through sex he hadn't been able to quit smiling.)

\- or actually, come to think of it, she should probably get her personal assistant to do that. There'd be pictures snapped of Ashlee going in, and, within the hour, celebrity gossip sites squawking about how she's desperate to spice up their sex life since her husband finds her totally hideous when pregnant, or something. Ashlee sighs and rubs her thumb against the petals of her wrist tat, looks down at it and thinks _said to help women in childbirth,_ thinks, _symbolizes happy marriage._

There are pretty people of indeterminate gender making out in the corner, and Ashlee watches them curiously, trying to pretend she isn't, while she waits.

She thinks about the ride home, about maybe continuing their earlier conversation on looking for a place in Chicago. Maybe not. She is awfully tired. She thinks of the cool of the master suite, of collapsing gratefully into their giant bed. Pete will be up most of the night, if she knows him at all - in and out of rooms, pacing manically around the house, overflowing with floods of ideas for his latest project - and in the morning she'll likely awake to find him watching her sleep.

Her BlackBerry buzzes. It's a _rdy 2 go ill b thr n a sec_ from Pete. He's probably, like, within fifty feet of her - like that ever stopped Pete's fetish for texting. Ashlee smiles, fond, at no one in particular.

She fiddles in her purse, slicks on another coat of lip gloss. Then she wraps her arms around herself, leans back under the heaviness there, and keeps on waiting for something, for someone; waiting for a boy.

 

seems like I can finally rest my head on something real 

**\- Ashlee Simpson, "Pieces of Me"**


End file.
